Poets, philosophers, and artists create visions of the afterlife that
fire our imaginations. Two such representations of the afterlife are
depicted here. These maps of the afterlife are depicted in Robert Thurman's
translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a classic text of
Buddhist wisdom and religious thought composed in the 8th century, and
in the medieval epic poem of the Christian afterlife, The Divine
Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri in the 14th century. Despite
the cultural differences between the faiths that inspired these maps,
there are remarkable similarities between them. On closer inspection,
the spiritual pathways that mark our human journey to Heaven and Hell
may not be so different after all.